Let’s adjust to its absence the inevitable way our eyes adjust to darkness. Let’s look elsewhere for permanent, long-term power solutions for heavily populated and plugged-in southern California.

It’s time.

The plant’s been shut down since January. One-third of its workers are being laid off. We just survived a brutal summer without the facility. And the plant’s twin operating licenses will expire in 10 years anyway, unless the plant operator seeks and receives a 20-year extension.

What’s more, California has banned any new nuclear reactors for years because — D’oh! — the country lacks a permanent repository for nuclear waste.

Not to mention Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or the fact that nuclear power’s recent record of safety and reliability pretty much evaporated like radiation in the sky following the March 11, 2011, meltdown at the Fukushima plant in Japan. Good thing we don’t live in an earthquake zone. Oh, wait.

Frankly, the question shouldn’t be: “Why decommission the San Onofre nuclear power plant?” It should be: “Why wait?”

Who am I to say this? Well, I’m someone whose family uses a lot of electricity. I’m a journalist who covered the San Onofre plant a decade ago. I’m one of the 8.5 million people who live within 50 miles of it. And I’m one of the 1,000 or so people who endured four hours of public testimony on the plant’s uncertain future Tuesday night in Dana Point.

Driving to Orange County, I knew that my mind would wander during the meeting’s most technical comments. But I still found myself speeding past the twin silos of the plant, which provides one-fifth of San Diego County’s power, in eager anticipation precisely because the San Onofre issue is as serious as the testimony would be.

A 13-member panel featured several San Diegans, including a retired nuclear engineer from Leucadia and a Solana Beach mother who measured the radiation levels of her family’s food for months while living in Japan last year.

The 850-seat room was so packed that people who left temporarily would have to wait in a line by the fire marshal for someone else to leave so they could trickle back in. Judging by their T-shirts, half the people in the crowd were union workers pulling for the plant to restart — for the employment opportunities. Judging by the jeers and cheers, swarms of people showed up to lobby for and against a spectrum of possibilities, from a fast restart to an operating-license amendment requiring greater oversight to a permanent shutdown.

One thing was clear from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission official present Tuesday: One of the plant’s reactors, which shut down Jan. 9 for routine maintenance, won’t be restarted for months, if not years.

When the other reactor might fire up again is unclear; regulators won’t receive a plan for its restart until summer 2013 at the earliest.

Southern California Edison, which runs the plant and owns 78.21 percent of it, shut down that second reactor on Jan. 31 when a major malfunction released a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere.

What was the problem? Some tubes containing radioactive water degraded prematurely. The damage happened in a massive steam generator that had been replaced just a year earlier, and in another that had its replacement 18 months earlier. The total bill for those replacements: more than $670 million.

Before this debacle, the most tubes that had been permanently plugged at any U.S. nuclear power plant as a result of heavy wear or damage was 29. Get this: At San Onofre, 510 tubes had to be permanently plugged in one reactor and 807 in another.

It’s entirely possible that one of those reactors won’t be allowed to restart without new generators.

And don’t think Southern California Edison or San Diego Gas & Electric or the city of Riverside — which own 20 percent and 1.79 percent of the plant, respectively — would pay for that expense on their own. Nope. Undoubtedly, ratepayers would be on the hook to cover those hundreds of millions of dollars.

That would be on top of paying costs to operate an inoperable plant for months. Edison and SDG&E ratepayers are being billed about $835 million this year for San Onofre’s operation, maintenance and capital costs.

This is California. There are alternatives to nuclear power, wind and solar chief among them. Those will cost money, too, but it’s time to switch.